I moved to a French village for a man I met online. The village isn’t on any map.

I’m typing this from his study. The WiFi cuts every ten minutes and I don’t know if this will post. If you’re reading this, I need you to know my name and where I am. In case I don’t make it out tonight.

His name is Marc. Dating app, two years ago, I was in Brooklyn, he was somewhere in the French countryside west of Paris. Sunset over a stone wall in his profile pic, glass of wine, and I don’t know. There was something lonely about him. I recognized it. I swiped right. He messaged first.

We FaceTimed every night for two years. Every single night. Copper pots behind him, dusk through the kitchen window. He looked like an ad for the life I wanted. He’d remember things I mentioned once, at 11 pm on a Tuesday, and bring them up weeks later with the date memorized. I thought that meant he loved me.

I need to tell you about me so you understand why he chose me. I’m 28. Half Cape Verdean, half American. Grew up behind a wall in Riyadh, thirty identical houses, thirty identical lawns. Boarding school in Geneva at thirteen. College in New York. I speak three languages and none of them sound like me. My whole life I’ve been whoever the room needed. The closeted kid in Saudi. The fluent fraud in Geneva. The guy eating cereal for dinner in an apartment he can’t afford, alone.

Marc saw through all of it. Or I thought he did. He’d say “tell me something nobody knows” and then just sit there on the screen, not reacting, not performing back at me, and I’d end up telling him things I’d never said out loud. About my father. About David, the boy I loved at sixteen who I couldn’t tell anyone about because of where we lived. About how I set an alarm at six and hit snooze until seven thirty because the sound of the alarm is the only proof that a new day started. Stupid things. Real things.

Two years of this. Fifteen days together in person total. And then I just. I gave up my apartment, packed twelve boxes, and flew to France.

He picked me up at Charles de Gaulle. When I came through arrivals and saw him standing by that battered Peugeot, I walked fast. Not a run. My bag was heavy and my legs were shaking. He met me halfway. Pulled me in. One of those hugs where your whole body goes quiet for a second. I pressed my face into his neck and he smelled like coffee and wool and I just stood there breathing him in while taxis honked behind us. He said “T’es là” and I said “I almost didn’t get on the plane” and he said “But you did.”

He kissed me. Hard. Hands on my jaw. On a late-night call two years ago I’d described my perfect first kiss. This was it. Exactly.

The drive was an hour west of Paris. The A13, then smaller roads, then smaller ones. At some point the GPS died. “Signal lost. Route calculation unavailable.” Marc said we didn’t need it. He knew the way.

I checked my phone. No signal. The dashboard clock said 2:47. My phone said 4:12. Nearly ninety minutes’ difference. I figured the phone lost its time sync.

The road narrowed. Trees pressing in on both sides, branches scraping the mirrors. The light went gray-green, filtered through canopy too thick for July.

Then the village appeared. One second trees, the next second stone. Like it had been waiting.

Rapilly. Sixty buildings, maybe seventy. Dark granite. Half-timbered facades, slate roofs. Flower boxes on every window, every flower the exact same shade of pink. A fountain. A church tower. Mist in the lanes. It was beautiful.

It was silent. Not quiet. NOTHING. No children, no dogs, no radio, no wind. I could hear the car’s engine cooling. I could hear the fountain.

That was it.

Marc said “That’s what’s special about it” and drove to his house on the eastern edge where the buildings end and the forest begins.

The house was beautiful too. Old stone, thick walls. Inside it smelled like bread and lavender and something underneath. Wet stone. Something underneath the wet stone. I’m not going to describe every room because I don’t have time but you need to know about the photographs. On the mantle. Marc hiking. Marc cooking. Marc on a mountain ridge at sunset. Every photo: just Marc. Self-timer, he said. Tripod. “When you live alone long enough you learn to document yourself.”

I picked up the mountain photo. The shadows on his face were wrong. Falling from the left but the sun was setting on the right. And in the corner, barely visible, a second set of footprints in the snow leading to where Marc stands. No footprints leading away.

He showed me the bedroom. Low ceiling, white linen. The pillow on my side, left side, my preferred side, was already dented. Like someone had been sleeping there. In my shape.

“Home,” he whispered into my hair. His hand was on the back of my neck. “You’re home now.”

When he touched my face his hand was cool. Not cold but not warm either. Like touching a wall. I leaned into it anyway.

That first night he asked me about my day. The flight. The terminal. Everything.

“The gate agent almost made me miss it,” I said.

“Tell me about her,” he said. He was sitting close. Close enough that I could feel his breath. “I want to know everything about today. Everything.”

So I did. And every time I stopped he’d ask something that pulled me back in. Not “how did that feel” but “what did the tarmac smell like” and “what was the exact sound of the boarding announcement.” I talked for an hour. He just sat there the whole time, not moving, watching me like I was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

While I talked his eyes changed. His pupils got huge. Not from the light. They opened with my voice. Black swallowing the brown. When I stopped talking they shrank back. When I started again they opened.

Like breathing.

After I fell asleep I half woke up and felt his hand in my hair. Same stroke, same pressure, over and over, exactly the same each time. A loop. I put my hand on his chest. It rose and fell perfectly. But there was no heartbeat. Just a vibration. The hum of something running in the walls. The sound a refrigerator makes. The sound of machinery.

I told myself I was tired. Jet lag. New bed. You tell yourself whatever you have to at 3 AM when the other option is getting up and leaving and having nowhere to go.

Later that week I woke up at 4 AM. Marc was on his back. Eyes wide open. Fixed on the ceiling. Unblinking. His lips were twitching. Fast. Making shapes that weren’t words in any language I know. This low sound coming out of him, almost static, but shaped. Like syllables. I touched his shoulder and he snapped awake. Not gradually. Not with the confusion of sleep. Instant. A smile assembled itself on his face. “Can’t sleep?” he said.

Another night I looked out the bedroom window at 3 AM and Marc was standing in the garden. Twenty meters from the tree line. Arms at exactly the same angle from his body. A moth landed on his forearm. Crawled up to his face. Over his eye. He didn’t blink. Then his head started to rotate toward the window. Just his head. Shoulders didn’t move. Twenty degrees. Thirty. Past where a neck should bend. When it faced me it was still smiling. I hit the light switch. Looked back. Gone. A perfect circle of dead grass where he’d been standing.

The bedroom door opened behind me. Marc. Pajamas. Glass of water. Hair mussed. He couldn’t have gotten there that fast.

“You were outside,” I said. “In the garden. Your head was—”

“I was in the kitchen.” His voice was soft. Concerned. “I couldn’t sleep. You were sleeping so beautifully I didn’t want to wake you.” He stepped closer. “Why would I go outside? In the dark? When you’re here?”

And it sounded right. It sounded so right that I almost started crying because what if I imagined it. What if I was already losing my mind.

He touched my face. Cool hand. “Let’s go back to bed.”

I can hear him moving around downstairs.

The roads loop. I went for a walk on day three. Past the fountain, past the bakery, past the church, out the southern road. Twenty minutes. The road curves, the trees thin. Open sky. Then rooftops. A church tower. The village square. I was back. I’d walked in a straight line.

I tried again. Marked a tree with a scratch from a rock. Walked fifteen minutes the other way. Open sky ahead. And then I emerged into the square. My scratch was on a tree at the edge of the square. The forest had moved.

I told Marc. He smiled. “The roads know where they go,” he said. He put a plate in front of me. Crêpes au sarrasin. Perfect. “Every path leads home.”

The village isn’t on any map. I searched from the study, one bar of WiFi. Typed “Rapilly commune Calvados” and got a census page. Population 44. Ok. Tried “Rapilly village France.” Nothing. “Rapilly Calvados directions.” Nothing. Page loads, sits there, times out. I tried BBC. Loaded fine. Reddit. Fine. Anything about this place specifically just. Stops.

“We’re not on the map,” Marc said. “It’s ours. Our own world.”

The villagers smile. All of them. The same smile. Same crinkle at the eyes, same slight part of the lips. The old man on the bench, the woman sweeping her doorstep, the baker. Like they all learned from the same photograph.

One morning I watched a fly land on the baker’s eye. It crawled across his iris. He didn’t blink. He was still smiling at the closed door after I left.

I went for a walk one night at 2 AM because I couldn’t sleep. The square was empty. Every window dark. Every door closed. And then at dawn they were simply there. Between one second and the next. The old man on the bench. The woman mid-sweep. Like a game loading from a saved state.

Marc threw me a dinner party. The four guests arrived at the exact same moment. Walking in unison. Footsteps hitting the cobblestones in rhythm. One of them ate dessert. I watched his jaw work as he raised the fork. But when his mouth opened for the next bite the previous one was still there. Unchewed. Dry.

Every embrace at the door was the same duration. Three seconds. I counted.

One more thing about the dinner. When one of the guests, Pierre, asked me “De quoi vous avez peur?” (What are you afraid of?), the table went still. All four of them turned their heads toward me. Not all at once. In sequence. Their smiles didn’t change.

I found Marc’s laptop one day while he was out. Empty. No files, no folders, no browser history. It had never been connected to the internet. It was a prop. The whole room was a prop.

In the bottom drawer of his desk I found a pencil drawing. A man’s face with sharp cheekbones and dark eyes. Under it, in tight handwriting: “THOMAS. FIRST ATTEMPT. 1878.”

The journals. I have to tell you about the journals. WiFi dropped again. My hands won’t stop shaking.

Attic. Cardboard box, soft with damp. Dozens of notebooks. All Marc’s handwriting.

The first page: “SUBJECT: E. MARSH. PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.”

That’s me.

“E. presents as anxious-avoidant with strong people-pleasing tendencies. Third Culture Kid profile. Cape Verdean-American raised in Riyadh, Geneva, Brooklyn. Adaptive personality architecture across all three. He becomes what each environment requires. This makes him exceptionally responsive to sustained attention and active listening. He is not accustomed to being the focus.”

“DIETARY: Coffee black, one sugar. Comfort foods: rice and beans (mother’s), grilled cheese (childhood). Aversion to raw tomato, textural.”

“SLEEP PATTERNS: Left side dominant. Deep sleep begins approximately 45 minutes after closing eyes. During deep sleep, he is unreachable.”

“PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE. PRIMARY WOUND: First romantic attachment at 16. Male. Name: David K. Relationship concealed due to environment (Riyadh). He believes love requires hiding. He will tolerate extraordinary dysfunction in exchange for the feeling of being fully known. LEVERAGE POINT.”

“ATTRACTION PROFILE: Responsive to competence, domesticity, and focused attention. Physical type: broader build, dark features, manual confidence. NOTE: Deep body shame. Will interpret physical acceptance as proof of love. EXPLOIT.”

The notes go back YEARS. Before we matched. Before we ever spoke. Printed screenshots of my Instagram annotated in red ink. My walking route, timestamped. He knew my coffee order. My thread count. He practiced the crêpes. He ordered the lavender soap from Bayeux because I mentioned once at 11:22 pm on November 14th that I liked lavender. Every single detail I thought I was sharing for the first time he already had in a notebook.

He didn’t remember because he loved me. He remembered because he was studying me. Every FaceTime call was data collection and I just sat there in my underwear on my unmade bed giving him everything because nobody had ever bothered to ask.

I broke into the basement that night. The padlock was new. Brass against ancient wood. Three strikes with a hammer wrapped in a towel.

Stone steps. Narrow. The air changed with each step down. Got thick. Warm. Body-temperature warm. It tasted like iron and dirt and something sweet I didn’t want to think about.

The basement is larger than the house above it.

The beams aren’t wood. They branch and join like roots. Like veins. When I pressed my hand against one it was warm. Moving. Barely.

On the far wall, carvings. Older than the house by millennia. Humanoid figures surrounding a central image: a large circle containing a smaller circle. Tendrils extending in every direction. Below, in crude Latin: NE CIBUM TUAM AMET.

I typed it into my phone’s translation app. It gave me two options. “Do not love your food.” Or: “Do not let your food love you.”

Against the wall: belongings. Forty-two collections. Suitcases, backpacks, trunks. Each tagged with a handwritten label.

EMILE GARNIER. 1834-1851.

THOMAS HARGREAVES. 1878-1891.

SOFIA JOHANSSON. 1912-1923.

MARIE-CLAIRE BEAUMONT. 1952-1964.

COLETTE FAVRE. 1971-1983.

YUKI TANAKA. 2003-2009.

KARIM OSMAN. 2022-2024.

And next to Karim’s collection: a blank tag.

ELIOT MARSH. 2024 – PRESENT.

My hands started shaking.

I opened Karim’s bag. A rainbow flag keychain. A hand-knitted scarf with uneven tension and dropped stitches. A copy of Giovanni’s Room with the spine cracked at page 112. A Polaroid: Karim, twenty-four, dark eyes, a gap between his front teeth, wearing the scarf. And Marc. Same face. Same smile. On the back, in blue pen: “Day 30. I think I might stay forever.”

Near the floor: fingernail scratches in stone. AIDE-MOI. HELP ME. IT CAN HEAR YOU. DON’T TELL IT YOUR NAME.

I tried to leave the basement. The door stuck. Wouldn’t move. Five seconds of my breath loud against stone. Then it gave, sudden and easy. Like it was never stuck. Like something had been holding it shut and decided to let go.

I put the journal on the kitchen table the next night. Open to LEVERAGE POINT.

He looked at it. His face went through something. Surprise? Then concern. Then something like guilt. Then back to concern. Each one lasting exactly the right amount of time. Like he was trying them on.

“Those are notes,” he said. “From a long time ago. When I was trying to understand attachment. Bowlby, Ainsworth. It sounds clinical because it IS clinical. But it’s not—”

“‘Will tolerate extraordinary dysfunction in exchange for feeling fully known,'” I read. “‘LEVERAGE POINT.'”

Nothing. For a long time, nothing.

“I should have written it differently,” he said. “I was cold. I should have written ‘the thing that hurt him most.'”

“The beach,” I said. “Jeddah. With my father. You—” My voice stopped. “You told me that memory last week like it was mine.”

He didn’t move.

“I’ve never been to a beach with my father in Jeddah. My mother took me. We watched planes.”

One second of nothing. His face just. Went out. Like I was looking at a wall. Something with no rooms behind it.

“Does it matter?” he said. His voice was flat. “You remember the beach. You remember being loved on the beach. I gave you that. Does it matter whose father was holding your hand?”

He told me what he is that night. Or tried to.

“I’m old,” he said, but the word came out wrong. Layered. His voice and a woman’s voice and something underneath both of them. His French broke apart mid-sentence and a child’s voice came through singing something I didn’t recognize. His mouth kept moving. I could see him fighting to get back to his own voice.

“I have been—” Three languages at once. Then silence. He was breathing hard. Like he’d pulled himself back from drowning.

“I can’t leave it,” he said. Just Marc again, mostly. “I am it. The roads, the houses, the people. They’re me. All of it is me.”

“You’re eating me,” I said.

“Not—” His voice cracked. Something underneath it, something old, pushing through. “Not eating. When you tell me. About. The feeling—”

He stopped. Breathed. When he spoke again it was Marc, mostly.

“When you tell me about your day, the warmth of it, the ache, the relief of being seen. I take that. Gradually. Every night. The vividness fades. You become flat. When there’s nothing left you just… go out.”

He said he didn’t want to consume me. He wanted me to stay. Willingly. And while he said it he looked at me with this expression that. I don’t know. It could have been love. Or it could have been something he learned from the forty-two people before me who thought they loved him back.

I said okay. I took his hand. I let him walk me upstairs. Each step creaked under me but not under him. Halfway up I looked back and the living room was dark, fire out, and from up there the furniture didn’t look like furniture anymore. It looked like the inside of something. I don’t know how else to say it. Like I was standing inside a body.

I got into bed. His arm wrapped around me. Cool. The same temperature as the walls.

I’ve been starving him for nine days. Every night he says “tell me about your day” and I say “Fine. Read. Came to bed.” That’s it. Nothing he can use. And the village is dying.

The flower boxes went brown first. Then the fountain water got thick, almost syrupy. The baker’s smile is stuck now—one corner lifting and falling and lifting, like a broken gif. Henri has been sitting in his truck for three days. Engine catches, idles, cuts out, catches again. A spider built a web between his wrist and the steering column and he hasn’t moved to break it. The old man on the bench closed his eyes two days ago. Hasn’t opened them. But the smile is still there. Smiling with nothing behind it.

He told me he IS the village. I didn’t get what that meant until I watched it starve with him. The baker, Henri, the old man. They’re not people. They’re his fingers. And I’m watching them go numb one by one. He can’t leave this place to find someone else. He can’t make me talk. He has to be loved into it. That’s all he knows how to do. So the only weapon I have is not loving him back.

I had a memory yesterday. My apartment in Brooklyn. Eating cereal, waiting for Marc to call. I could see it perfectly. The bowl, the counter, the way my phone screen would light up. But I couldn’t feel any of it. That flutter you get when someone’s about to call and you know they’re going to ask about your day and actually want the answer? Gone. I can picture the room but the feeling’s been scooped out of it. I can describe it but I can’t be in it anymore.

Two days ago I looked in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth and my reflection lagged. Just for a second. My mouth moved and the mirror followed a half-beat after, like a bad FaceTime connection. I blinked. It synced back up. I told myself it was exhaustion.

Then this morning I looked in the mirror and my reflection glitched. One frame. Less than a second. Karim’s face. Dark eyes. Gap between the teeth. Then mine again. I gripped the sink until my knuckles went white.

Day six I found a woman sitting in the cemetery behind the church. Colette. She was the only one in the village who didn’t smile. Her tag in the basement said 1971-1983. Twelve years. She got out. I don’t know how or why she came back.

She told me the roads open when the entity breaks. Between three and five in the morning, when the village sleeps. Take nothing. Walk. Don’t stop.

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

She looked at the church tower. “My daughter came after me. She’s still here.”

That was all she said about it.

“Some of the feelings will come back,” she said. “Not all. Never all.”

I asked her how many feelings came back.

“Enough to get through the day,” she said. “Not enough to want to.”

I’m going to try tonight. 3 AM. The southern road. I have my passport in my back pocket. No bag. Nothing that belonged to this house.

Marc is downstairs. I can hear him in the kitchen but he hasn’t cooked in days. There’s nothing to cook. There’s a bowl in the fridge with something gray in it, blue veins running through. The wine went to vinegar. The bread tastes like nothing.

He keeps asking me to talk. Not the ritual. Just anything. He’s not performing anymore. He’s starving.

Part of me wants to go down there. I got as far as the study door. Hand on the knob. I could hear him in the kitchen opening the fridge. The hum of nothing inside it.

“Tell me something,” he called up. Just his voice. “Please. Anything. The bird you watched this morning. The sky. Anything.”

His voice cracked on the please. Not fake. Really cracking.

I opened the door. I was on the first step before I stopped myself. Because I remember what it felt like to have someone’s full attention. To be asked about my day by someone who actually wanted the answer. And I knew if I sat at that table and told him about the bird, the three notes it sang, I wasn’t getting back up. Just like Karim. Just like Colette’s daughter.

I went back to the study. Closed the door. Downstairs, Marc stopped moving.

I know it was fake. I know he’s been doing this for two hundred years. But my body doesn’t care. My stupid lonely body felt it and it doesn’t care that the thing feeling it back wasn’t human.

I don’t know if the roads will open tonight. I don’t know if there’s enough of me left to walk them.

WiFi just flickered. I’m going to type fast.

If this posts, if the connection holds, then someone knows my name is Eliot Marsh, I’m in a village called Rapilly somewhere west of Paris, and a man named Marc is going to ask me about my day one more time.

I’m not going to answer.

Wait. He’s coming up the stairs. I can hear them creaking. Slowly. One at a time.

He’s outside the study door. I can see the shadow in the gap underneath. It’s not moving. Just standing there.

He’s whispering. In my voice. The night I told him about David, played back through the door. “I’ve never told anyone that before. I’ve never told anyone that before. I’ve never told anyone that before.”

On a loop.

If I don’t post again, check the basement. Look for the bag with my name on it.

There won’t be much inside.